Sickness and Health

IN SICKNESS & IN HEALTH

According to the World Health Organization – “Health is not just the absence of disease. It is a feeling of total well-being on the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual realms of a person’s life.”

Sickness involves the whole person; the mental, emotional, spiritual and physical aspects. The spirit of the body animates all living things and controls the body’s natural processes and preserves the healthy balance of the body. The spirit reacts as a whole to any irritant and when it becomes inactive, we die.

Disease results when a substance is strong enough to produce an imbalance of the spirit. When the body gets sick the spirit is in a state of imbalance and expresses this imbalance as symptoms. Each person’s unique symptoms are a reflection of their vital force acting to rebalance itself against illness.

For example, when you get the flu your body mounts an attack to kill the bacteria through fever, sneezing, sweating and mucous. These symptoms help the vital force burn out and kill off the invading bacteria. At this stage of sickness, it is important to help the body clean itself out without using medicines that suppress the body’s immune system.

WHAT IS HOLISTIC HEALTH & ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE?

Holism is a philosophical concept in which an entity is seen as more than just the sum of its parts. This means that since each part of the body is connected to each other part of the body, we should seek care in a holistic manner.

To focus our attention on optimal health we must recognizes that our bodies are not just the sum of our individual parts, but are actually interdependent systems that synergistically interact to support our entire physical bodies. For example, a nervous system does not work if the heart has stopped working, and the heart stops working if the respiratory system has shut down for more than a few minutes. In order to reap the full benefits of optimal health, we need to shift our focus from disease management to optimal health restoration, promotion and prevention.

Holistic Health is a system of comprehensive or total patient care that considers the physical, emotional, mental, social, economic and spiritual needs of the person; his or her response to illness; and the effect that illness has on the rest of the person’s life.

Alternative or Complementary Medicine is the umbrella name for any of the systems of medical diagnosis and treatment differing in technique from that of the allopathic practitioner’s use of drugs and surgery to treat disease and injury.

Western (allopathic) medicine is not the only health care system of value. True health is achievable through diet and lifestyle modification, individualized nutritional habits (the basics of learning how to eat again), health education, as well as with homeopathic treatment, herbs and flower essences.

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SYMPTOMS & SICKNESS?

Symptoms are the language of a disease — the body’s attempt to balance itself against a substance. Without symptoms, a person could have a potentially life threatening illness with no way of identifying it. Many conventional drugs try to inhibit and suppress symptoms — sometimes leading to even more serious symptoms. Conventional (allopathic) physicians do not usually recognize the new series of symptoms as being related to the old. Thus, they treat them as new and unrelated problems.

Did you know that a fever is the body’s attempt to activate the immune system’s white blood cells and defend itself from infection? If a person is given a symptom-suppressing medication — fighting the fever — too soon, the patient will be less able to fight the actual infection.

‘There are two obstacles to vibrant health and longevity:
ignorance and complacency.’ – World Health Organization